Thursday, March 06, 2008

Ask Coriel: Retribution and Spell Damage

Rudolphe of Echo Isles writes in:

Something that concerns me is the removal of spell damage on the PTR from paladin gear to give room for stats more geared towards melee damage, however this seems to be a Nerf to Judgement of Command at the same time. Do you think they are going to adjust the ability to scale with attack power or give us alliance paladins seal of blood to make up for the loss in spell damage? I personally have about 44 spell damage on my gear because it doesn't seem worth it to work towards spell damage when attack power, hit and crit will increase my dps more since most ret abilities are based off of that.

The removal of spell damage is a nerf to Judgement of Command, but is a buff to the Ret paladin overall. Basically, if you look at where your total damage comes from, it looks roughly like:

There's a saying in computer science, "Optimize the common case." For the ret paladin, 90% of her damage scales with AP, but only 30% scales with Spell Damage. So warrior-like gear that concentrates on AP is much better than Spell Damage gear.

Now should JoC be changed? From a logical point of view it probably should change to scale with AP. But you don't make changes to an ability in a vacuum. Ret Paladins are in a pretty decent position overall--even with JoC not scaling--so I think Blizzard will leave it alone for now.

8 comments:

The problem with the change is that is not the same change for all players. Alliance players will see a very different result from there changes than a Horde player will. With the Seal of Blood being better scaled with Attack Power, better scaled with Haste, these changes leave Alliance Paladin significantly behind.

Practically, it's not a big deal, and I don't recall my Crusader Strike or SoC damage being higher before than what I put out now. (Judging Command is sadly anemic in comparison...)

Now, there is a significant difference in SoB DPS versus SoC DPS. Per MaxDPS.com, my dwarfadin puts out about 657 DPS on a boss. If he grew pointy ears and taller, he'd put out about 696 DPS, for a difference of 39 DPS.

Losing spell damage means nothing to me, as I am a PvP Ret paladin. I only judge SoC at rank 1 so I can conserve mana and try to proc my libram and maybe get a crit that will help my Vengence. Other than that, I'm too busy trying to be a better utility player by cleansing, stunning and then finally burning down the healer with my warrior teammate.

Big deal on spell damage....I don't feel we need adjustments to anything. However the reason I judge is to refresh and a chance that my libram will proc. I find the use of haste a far better stat even though it reduces SoC proc chance. Our damage is limited to amount of our swings the best counter is haste. The second best counter would be more ap.....but if they put too much str or ap on our gear warriors would be rolling for it also. :)